nose above water

I’m in the middle of an experiment to see how many hours it’s possible to work over the course of a four-day weekend.

I hate it, I hate it, I hate it when my patients die. I can’t stop them. And they keep doing it, one after the other. Every twelve hours. We keep calling the same consultants. “Hi, please come and help, we have a patient septic, intubated, crashing, maxed on pressors, because of yyy. . . ” “Are we both awake? Didn’t we just have this exact same conversation twelve hours ago?”

Surgery is good when it works. But when it doesn’t, you took a person who was alive, at home, walking, talking, eating – above all, alive – and now they’re almost none of the above, and it’s because we tried to do something. Why did we do that? Please can I have the rewind button. . . please let’s go back a couple days and not do this. . . Jesus don’t let my patients die. . .

I do good CPR, I found out. Unfortunately they needed more than good CPR.